We’re paid to be paranoid here at Managed Solutions. When this message arrived in my inbox today it was a rarity. Rare because it is one of very few phishing Emails that have bypassed my anti-spam mechanisms. Phishing is a process by which a criminal pretends to be a legitimate entity in an effort to gain passwords, identity, bank account or other private data. Here is the text of the message:

I am interested in purchasing a private residence in your country or in any country you are well-acquainted with.

The Property must be located in a well-reserved,serene,secure and highly-hygienic environment because I am most particular about the safety and sound health of my family.
I wish to make this transaction with you in a very secret and confidential manner due to my position as a cabinet minister here in my country Ghana.

Therefore,upon response from you I will connect you with my agent here whom I trust so much to represent my interest in this purchase.franciskweme2007@[hidden].com
Thank you and accept my kindest regards,

Dr. dan

Want to complete this article?

What issues do you see with the text of this message and why would I assume that it is a Phishing Email? Complete this story via comment and we’ll feature your comment as a part of the article and link back to your website.

We have a winner, David Schur completed the article via this comment on Facebook:

David Schur – I’ll take a shot Joe.
1) does not address you by name. Nobody will buy your house, or send you millions of dollars without knowing who the heck you are
2) Total lack of pii. If this was legit, they would know your address, which is the relevant pii in this case. My bank or cc includes the last 4 digits of my account to let me know the email is real.
3) Typo’s…when will the phishers learn that simply hiring a native english speaker to proofread would make a difference (maybe there is ba business opportunity here)
4) simple common sense…to good to be true = false…100% of the time

This won’t work for a real hack…but luckily phishers these days never invest in data that connects your email to any meaningful form of pii…luckily axiom 4 will ALLWAYS be true

Joe’s comment – I really like David’s rule #4, I think Phishers best tool is exploiting people’s greed. Also David had no desire to have a link back to anywhere so I asked him what Charity he likes, here is his response:

“American Red Cross…when bad stuff happens they get my money…then I can safely and with good conscience ignore the inevitable scam charity emails” – David Schur

We were made aware of an issue that ADP is reporting with some of their Payroll customers. Here is the text of the warning message they are sending their clients:

“ADP is receiving reports of a phishing email scam targeting ADP EasyPayNet clients who perform their payroll via the Internet. Phishing email scams are designed to mimic legitimate websites and are intended to compromise your login credentials. The email is fraudulent and did not come from ADP. Please immediately delete the email and do not click on any links in the email or enter any login information. Please be aware that ADP would never send an email asking you to provide or enter your login credentials for any reason.”

Here is a screenshot of the Phishing Email:

Sample of ADP Phishing Email

We have a reader submitted example of another ADP Phishing Email circulating in July 2012, this version actually brings you to a site hosting known malicious code and un-protected systems will become infected if they follow the links:

This morning I happened to get a Phishing message from the contact form on this website. It was carefully crafted and was devised to obtain routing and bank information to most certainly relieve us of any and all funds in the account. When I went to investigate the site, I quickly learned that it had already been removed from the dns records of the hosting provider – precisely what I had intended to inform them of. Someone had already reacted to this would be phisher and stopped them in their tracks. This is always nice to see because often times when we do something as a responsible netizen administrators of websites and hosting companies lack the resources to respond and address the threats.

This may sound familiar to you, you’re going through your business mail and setting aside the bills for your payables department. Oh, here is one for our website, Liberty Names of America. I guess our domain is expiring we better renew …. uh wait a minute, we don’t use Liberty Names of America. Why are they sending me a bill? It seems that some companies are founded with at the least ill advised business policies or perhaps far worse. Over the years as the operator of a small business I have seen a number of these predatory notices. The first one years ago was for some yellow page listing. It looked just like a bill you might get from the publisher of the yellow pages you run your advertisements in, only it was for some company you’ve never heard of and some book that no-one will see. Evidently people with similar scruples decided to get into the domain name business. There was even a allegation at one time that Verisign, Inc. (formerly Network Solutions) had sent similar notices to GoDaddy.com customers. We were unable to find evidence that these allegations were proven one way or the other.

Basically what these companies do is determine when your domain names are going to expire. They then send you a notice in the present example a “Domain Expiration Notice” and they encourage you to “renew today”. They will even bundle multiple domains you might have expiring at the same time in these notices. To make matters worse the prices in these letters is likely to be much higher than what you are already paying with your current registrar. If you receive one of these notices or worse yet are the victim of these predatory practices by mistaking them as legitimate, you can report a problem to InterNIC using their Registrar Problem Report form.

There has recently been a rise in the frequency and quality of many internet scams, including “phishing” scams. Phishing scams typically involve “casting out” a mass email spam that appears to be reputable companies requesting information from their clients. The idea being that a few people will fall for the scam, allowing the scammers to use the identity of the individuals who “took the bait” to obtain resources illegally using the victims credit card numbers, bank accounts, etc. There are a tremendous amount of articles on the web about these scams, and plenty of resources to help with the specific issues, the focus of this article is not to address the specific scams but instead to talk about email security issues and common misconceptions. A list of resources will be provided at the end of the article for interested parties who desire more information.

One of the most common misconceptions in the world of email, is that email is a secure means of communication. In most cases this is not true. The typical email setup affords a user very little privacy or security. A good rule of thumb is, don’t type or send anything via email that you wouldn’t want made public, because it could quite easily end up just that. To address this problem, there are alternative ways to transmit your message text and attachments securely. These technologies involve encrypting the contents of the message and any attachments and only allowing the message to be decrypted by the legitimate recipient. Businesses may also opt to utilize systems that allow for the sharing of files in a repository that includes authentication and encrypts all the data using secure protocols. These systems are ideal solutions for companies that have users and clients in multiple locations. A real world example of a system like this is one where clients upload their confidential files using a login and password provided by the vendor to the repository. Then the vendor receives an alert with a link to the file that they can then download via a secure connection from that repository. The data in turn never travels on the unsecured network without being encrypted, protecting its contents from potential snoops that may be operating in its path.

In closing, if we as businesses and individuals educate ourselves and take precautions to secure our private information. We will keep our data private, and discourage all the would be snoops from using the data against us or for their own gain.

In Joe's day job he helps manufacturers eliminate waste in their engineering, CNC programming and machining departments. He is currently 2018-2019 chair of the Sacramento Valley SME, an avid Maker and current Mechatronics student.